Meetings between persons are often required to advance a cooperative enterprise or reach a consensus. According to effective meetings.com (SMART Technologies, Inc., May 2003), over 11,000,000 meetings occur each day. The scheduling of such meetings is complicated where there are a large number of participants, or where participants are located in different time zones. In addition, supplying supporting materials to meeting participants, and doing so in a convenient format, can be a challenging task. Furthermore, during a meeting it is often desirable to take meeting notes, and assign action items to various meeting attendees. In addition, sidebar meetings are often desirable. Subsequent or secondary discussions may also be spawned. The process of manually scheduling meetings and follow-up meetings, distributing documents and other materials to meeting attendees, and taking meeting notes is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient. Accordingly, meetings and associated activities are extremely costly to businesses.
In a typical enterprise, the process of scheduling a meeting between participants often involves numerous communications between attendees in order to determine an acceptable time and agenda. For example, a significant amount of inefficient e-mail, facsimiles and voice mails may be required. Additional rounds of such communications may also be generated in connection with scheduling follow-up meetings and sidebar discussions.
Scheduling tools exist to facilitate the setting of meeting times and places. However, such applications are incapable of automatically resolving conflicts that may arise due to prospective meeting attendees being located in different time zones. Accordingly, such programs are of little assistance in setting meetings that will be attended by at least some of the attendees remotely, such as through video or teleconferencing. In addition, such programs do not provide for the creation of meeting notes during the meeting, the distribution of meeting materials, or convenient scheduling of subsequent or sidebar meetings.
Application programs that allow multiple users to participate in the creation of textual documents have been developed. However, such applications do not provide scheduling functions that can be used to schedule meetings, subsequent meetings, or sidebar discussions. In addition, such applications typically allow access to only one document at a time, and do not provide for the delivery of materials to meeting attendees.
Other application programs that have been developed to facilitate meetings include programs for scheduling resources, such as conference rooms. Although such applications provide a central location at which reservations for shared resources can be made, they do not provide for scheduling of meeting attendees, the distribution of meeting materials, or other functions.
Still other applications have been developed for facilitating meetings in which all or some of the participants are remote from one another. For example, online meeting and conferencing tools have been developed to facilitate communications between participants over a communication network. However, such applications do not provide a convenient interface for determining the identity of an attendee requesting speaking time. Furthermore, where multiple attendees have requested speaking time, the order in which such attendees are granted speaking time is determined by a meeting leader, rather than automatically. In addition, scheduling subsequent meetings or sidebar discussions, as well as access to textual and other materials, requires the use of separate applications and/or communications channels accessed outside of the context of the online meeting tool. Conventional on-line meeting tools also do not provide a facility for taking meeting minutes, and therefore such activities must also be done outside of the context of the online meeting tool.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a single application capable of performing multiple functions in connection with the scheduling and conduction of meetings. Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide a single application that could be used to automatically schedule meeting attendees, distribute materials to the attendees, allow for the entry of contemporaneous notes or minutes taken during a meeting, and facilitate the scheduling and conduction of subsequent or sidebar meetings.